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Ukraine at 30 : Fractured but Determined www.majal a.com

Editorial A Weekly Political News Magazine

On August 23, the Crimea Platform Summit was held as part of major events designed by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to commemorate the 30th anniversary of his country’s independence from the Soviet Union. A week-long series of events was held with the aim of engaging Ukraine’s Western allies to garner support against Russia.

In this week’s cover story, Maia Otarashvili highlights Zelensky’s tireless efforts and calls for the West to support his country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. She cites The Crimea Platform as a mechanism he created “to further mobilize the international community in support of Ukraine’s endeavor to end Russian occupation of Crimea.”

All 30 NATO’s members were represented at the summit, and prominent participants spoke in support of Ukraine’s right in Crimea. Although no tangible western response was taken to Russian aggression against the country, Zelensky is adamantly pushing for Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic integration and taking sincere initiatives to shoulder his country’s security issues. Maia believes this reflects his perception of “shifting global context” and that he “is committed to keeping up with the changing times.”

Iranian causalities of COVID19- have remained secret upon the Mullah’s orders. Since the onset of the pandemic, no sufficient information was revealed about the health situation in the Islamic Republic. Recent reports emerged that the virus death toll is approaching 400,000 people while no valid vaccines are being administered to the public, mainly due to Khamenei’s prohibition of importing reliable vaccines. Mahdi Akabaei unveils facts about the Iranian regime’s mishandling of the crisis and the repercussions which have led to public anger that may spark a national uprising that the regime fears.

Read these articles and more on our website eng. majalla.com. As always, we welcome and value our readers’ feedback and we invite you to take the opportunity to leave your comments on our website.

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Pandemic Death Toll

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People rally against the Taliban in Los Angeles People display placards and the flag of Afghanistan at a rally against the Taliban and developments in Afghanistan during a demonstration in downtown Los Angeles, California, U.S., August 21, 2021. United States )Reuters Photos(

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Phyllida Barlow at the Tate Modern Gallery in London People look at untitled works by Phyllida Barlow at the Tate Modern Gallery in London, Britain, 23 August 2021. The exhibition of sculptures and paintings by artist Phyllida Barlow is the latest in a series of free displays at Tate Modern and opens to the public on 23 August 2021 )EPA Photos(

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Ukraine at 30 : Fractured but Determined Zelensky Calls for Western Support Against Russia in Crimea Platform Summit

By Maia Otarashvili

Yes, his efforts have accomplished very little so far, but this is not for the lack of trying. Back in April, as Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky may not get Russia started to amass its troops on Ukraine’s boreverything right, but one thing is for sure – since be- ders, Zelensky sounded the alarm bells, asking the coming president in May 2019, he has worked tire- western leaders to stand in solidarity with Ukraine lessly to resolve Ukraine’s territorial integrity issues. against Russia. He regularly demands more involve-

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A handout photo made available by the Presidential press service shows Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky giving a press conference following the Crimean Platform summit in Kiev, Ukraine, 23 August 2021. (EPA/ PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SERVICE HANDOUT)

ment from the international community in Ukraine’s peace process to end the war in Donbas and regularly offers allies new venues for engagement. Zelensky has also openly complained that Ukraine’s NATO allies are not doing enough to support the country militarily, and continues to ask for Ukraine’s NATO and EU membership. So far, the western allies have been slow to come through for Ukraine. Statements of support and calls on Putin to stand down have not been followed up with meaningful action in a very long time. The array of sanctions imposed by the west on Russia years ago over Ukraine is growing stale, and the recent US greenlight for the controversial Nordstream-2 pipeline is a reminder that the allies are not willing to make any major sacrifices on behalf of Ukraine. The lackluster international response over the recent years to Russia’s continued occupation of Crimea and its involvement in Ukraine’s civil war in Donbas have further emboldened Moscow. Putin’s imperial ambitions over Ukraine have only solidified since 2014.

Zelensky may not have been able to achieve any tangible western response to Russia’s continued aggression against Ukraine, but he has been very successful in regularly garnering moral and public support from the leaders in Brussels and Washington. On August 24th Ukraine celebrated 30 years since its independence from the Soviet Union. Zelensky marked this occasion by organizing a full week of activities geared towards engaging Ukraine’s international allies. Delegations from 46 countries attended the meetings and festivities at Zelensky’s request – a major show of international support for Ukraine indeed, especially during a pandemic when international travel is still not fully safe for most.

One of the major events included the Crimea Platform summit held on August 23 in Kyiv. President Zelensky created the Crimea Platform as a mechanism to further mobilize the international community in support of Ukraine’s endeavor to end Russian occupation of Crimea. This was the first summit held under this initiative, and while tangible results are yet to be seen, it seems to have sent the right message to Russia. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov called it a “hollow propaganda venture” and added “Of course, [the Crimea Platform] is a Russophobic endeavor which is artificially created.” Lavrov continued “They will try to fan these sentiments to play to ultraradical neoNazi manifestations in modern Ukraine. Both the Kiev authorities and leaders of the Western world pander

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Zelensky may not have been able to achieve any tangible western response to Russia’s continued aggression against Ukraine, but he has been very successful in regularly garnering moral and public support from the leaders in Brussels and Washington. to these manifestations.” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kuleba reacted with glee, saying he was pleased to see Moscow’s nervous reaction to the initiative.

At the summit Zelensky asked the participants to consider the platform as a “center for the development and adoption of key international decisions on Crimea.”

He added that he was personally invested in doing everything possible to return Crimea to Ukraine “so that it becomes part of Europe together with Ukraine.”

Zelensky stressed that Russia’s illegal occupation of Crimea calls the entire global order into question.

“From today, we are actually starting the countdown to the liberation of our land - the Ukrainian peninsula.

It is quite possible that August 23, 2021, will go down in history as the day of the beginning of the de-occupation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol. The occupation of the Crimean Peninsula began in Moscow. We will definitely start the de-occupation of Crimea in Kyiv. Let’s start.”

All 30 NATO member states were represented at the summit. Some of the notable speakers included NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoana who spoke firmly of NATO’s “unwavering support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” He reminded the event attendees that the June NATO summit had made the Organization’s stance on Russia very clear: “We condemned Russia’s military build-up and destabilizing activities. And called on them to stop the human rights abuses and violations against all Ukrainians, including the Crimean Tatars. And I salute the leaders of this important community. And to end restrictions on freedom of navigation in the Black Sea, including access to the Sea of Azov and Ukrainian ports. We reiterated the decision of the Bucharest

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Summit that Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO. And we commended Ukraine’s commitment to a peaceful resolution of the conflict in eastern Ukraine.”

Geoana added that Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 had inspired NATO to increase its presence in the region.

“NATO ships routinely operate in the Black Sea in line with international law. We have stepped up our cooperation with Georgia and Ukraine, with more

Zelensky’s eagerness to remain outspoken about Ukraine’s security and foreign policy challenges, and show sincerity in his efforts to keep Ukraine on its path to Euro-Atlantic integration shows a president who clearly understands this shifting global context.

exercises, more port visits and sharing of situational awareness. Only last month’s Sea Breeze exercise – co-hosted by the US and Ukrainian navies, with more than 30 participating nations, 32 to be more precise – was an important example of this. NATO continues to support Ukraine’s efforts to consolidate democracy, strengthen the rule of law, and reform your security and defense sectors. Including through capacity-building support to the Ukrainian armed forces, and to tackle cyber and hybrid threats.”

President of the European Council, Charles Michel, was also among the keynote speakers and he too delivered a strong message on behalf of the European Union— “I am here to reaffirm the EU’s unwavering stance: we do not and will not recognize the illegal annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol by Russia. We will continue to staunchly enforce our non-recognition policy. And we will stand tall against any violations of international law.”

Michel also spoke of the worsening security situation in the Black Sea – “Unfortunately, Russia continues to act in ways that multiply the negative impact of the annexation. The continued militarization of the peninsula heavily affects the security situation in the Black Sea region. This should be reversed. The human rights situation remains dire, due to Russia’s efforts to forcibly integrate the peninsula into its mainland. The

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This handout picture released by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Service on August 23, 2021, shows the participants of the Crimea Platform summit who pose for a group photo in Kiev.

(Photo by - / UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SERVICE / AFP)

A handout photo provided by the Presidential press service shows European Council President Charles Michel (C) during the Crimea Platform summit in Kiev, Ukraine, 23 August 2021. (EPA/FOREIGN MINISTRY PRESS SERVICE HANDOUT)

Crimean Tatars continue to be persecuted, pressured and have their rights gravely violated. All this and ongoing destructive actions against the peninsula’s cultural heritage must stop.”

The festivities also included an impressive military parade in which Ukrainian troops marched alongside their NATO allies - which included soldiers from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. At the parade Zelensky told the international guests, “we are fighting for our people, because it is possible to temporarily occupy territories, but it is impossible to occupy people’s love for Ukraine.”

What’s refreshing about Zelensky is his understanding that show of local ownership of security issues is key to garnering greater international aid and support.

This is particularly important the context of the current environment of chaos, apathy, and despair in the Black Sea/Caucasus region. Without renewed local initiative and adamant calls for engagement from local leaders, the international community, especially the US and Europe, is becoming increasingly unwilling to fight the fights that locals won’t take on. This is evident from the experience of US withdrawal from Afghanistan and America’s unwillingness to meaningfully engage in solving conflicts in places like Nagorno-Karabakh, or step in to prevent further democratic backsliding in places of strategic importance like Georgia.

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President Zelensky created the Crimea Platform as a mechanism to further mobilize the international community in support of Ukraine’s endeavor to end Russian occupation of Crimea.

Zelensky’s eagerness to remain outspoken about Ukraine’s security and foreign policy challenges and show sincerity in his efforts to keep Ukraine on its path to Euro-Atlantic integration shows a president who clearly understands this shifting global context and is committed to keeping up with the changing times.

Maia Otarashvili is a Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Eurasia Program. Maia also serves as the Deputy Director of Research at FPRI. Her research interests include geopolitics and security of the Black Sea-Caucasus region, Russian foreign policy, and the post-Soviet “frozen” conflicts.

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Smuggling across Syrian-Iraqi Borders: New Challenge to Intl Coalition Assad Forces Hand Security Checkpoints in Syrian Desert to Tehran-backed Militias

By Jiwan Soz – Qamishli Smuggling activities between Syria and Iraq poses a new challenge for the US-led international coalition, whose troops are located on both sides of Syrian-Iraqi borders. The coalition forces are trying to

stop smuggling networks which mostly have close ties with Iranian-backed Syrian armed groups.

Although Iraqi authorities often announce that they foiled smuggling activities at the Syrian-Iraqi borders, the extended borderline which is over 600 km prevent security forces of both sides from full

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The coalition’s spokesman revealed that the US has provided advanced equipment to the Iraqi forces “for improved security and daily operations”, especially since local parties are smuggling ISIS female jihadists from Syrian camps to neighboring Iraq.

A file photo of an Iraqi policeman manning machine gun near the Iraqi-Syrian borders at the Abu Kamalqaim border crossing, the main border post between Iraq and Syria, September 8, 2012.

(REUTERS/Thaier al-Sudani)

In exclusive statements to Majalla, Colonel Wayne Marotto said, “The Coalition’s goal is to continue to develop and enable the ability of our local partners to maintain the fight against ISIS in their respective areas without external assistance and that includes the border between Iraq and Syria.”

Backed by the coalition, SDF are chasing ISIS dormant cells after the terrorist group’s declared defeat in Syrian town of Baghuz which was the extremists’ last haven more than two years ago.

The coalition also supports the Iraqi forces in chasmonitoring the borders, a source in the Combined ing the terrorist groups in addition to securing the Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve Syrian-Iraqi borders and preventing smuggling activities across them.

(CJTF-OIR) against ISIS told Majalla.

The CJTF is established by an international coa- The coalition’s spokesman revealed that the US lition that comprises Arab and foreign countries. has provided advanced equipment to the Iraqi forcThe CJTF-OIR is located at al-Tanf base in south- es “for improved security and daily operations”, west Syria which is few kilometers away from especially since local parties are smuggling ISIS regions controlled by the Syrian regime and its female jihadists from Syrian camps to neighboring Iranian-backed militia, which uses the areas sur- Iraq. rounding the base as crossing points between Syria Colonel Marotto said, “In January 2021, our Iraqi partners received four Rapid Aerostat Initial Deand Iraq, to smuggle drugs and arms.

The CJTF-OIR spokesperson Colonel Wayne ployment (RAID) surveillance towers. The CounMarotto, whose coalition backs Syrian Democratic ter ISIS Train and Equip Fund (CTEF) program Forces (SDF) along with Peshmerga (the mili- (funded by the U.S. Government) granted the altary forces of the autonomous Kurdistan Region most $14 million surveillance systems equipment of Iraq), in addition to the Iraqi Security Forces to the ISF.” (ISF), said, “CJTF-OIR maintains a presence at “This equipment provides capability critical to the an-Tanf Garrison in SW Syria and also in NE Iraqi Security Forces in their ongoing mission to Syria, where the Syrian Democratic Forces display defeat Daesh,” he added. continued progress against Daesh (ISIS).” He also However, the spokesman declined to comment on added that “Coalition forces support SDF opera- the continuing smuggling of arms and drugs betions and are developing the SDF’s capabilities to tween both countries, but he stressed that border security is coordinated between the coalition and enable it to operate independently.”

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local Syrian and Iraqi forces on both sides.

Alongside smuggling across Syria-Iraq borders, there are two serious challenges for the coalition and its local partners: ISIS dormant cells as well as the camps which house thousands of jihadist wives of ISIS fighters who are imprisoned by SDF. Despite the coalition’s announced support to form a UN tribunal to prosecute imprisoned ISIS elements, no practical steps have been taken until now, according to a Kurdish official in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.

ISIS has aggressively come back by launching multiple attacks particularly in the countryside of Deir ez-Zur in Syria. That came following the latest Turkish attack on Syrian SDF-controlled areas which was seized by Ankara and its militias in October 2019. Since then, ISIS elements have been taking advantage of the fight between SDF on one side and Turkish military and its militias on the other, and attacked the region.

Security sources in Iraqi Kurdistan said that the authorities arrested a number of female jihadists who were able to escape from their Syrian camps via local smuggling networks. They were on their way to central cities inside the Kurdish autonomous region.

Smugglers usually use Syrian-Iraqi borders to smuggle members of jihadists’ families to Kurdis-

tan, especially if they were Iraqi women.

Security sources in Kurdistan also added that Asayish (Kurdish internal security forces) and Peshmerga are securing the Kurdish region’s borders, after many smuggling operations took place.

On the other side, the pro-Iranian Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) control the other part of the Syrian-Iraqi borders. The PMF militias facilitate smuggling of civilians in coordination with the Syrian regime’s forces in Deir ez-Zur which is totally under the regime’s control except for small areas controlled by SDF. The Syrian regime handed most of its security points in rural areas of Deir ez-Zur to pro-Tehran local militia, which undergo smuggling of arms and drugs between Iraq and Syria and to Jordan, according to international media reports.

A few days ago, the Syrian regime handed eight of its security points on the road linking the city of Palmyra and Al-Sukhnah in the Syrian desert to pro-Iranian militias.

It is supposed that these security barriers were handed to Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba and Liwa Fatemiyoun in the Homs’ countryside. These militias are the main controller of the Syria-Iraqi borders, which means that the handover will lead to an increase in smuggling operations between both countries.

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A file photo of women walking through al-Hol displacement camp in Hasaka governorate, Syria, April 2019 ,1.

(REUTERS/Ali Hashisho)

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Pandemic Death Toll Approaches 400,000 in Iran Regime’s Deadly Plans Led to COVID- 19 Massacre

By Mahdi Akabaei All of Iran’s provinces are currently suffering from the COVID19- disaster. In fact, everyone knows that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is the reason behind the coronavirus massacre across the country. He explicitly issued a fatwa restricting the import of the vaccine and took all the practical steps to ensure his fatwa’s application on the ground. He further banned publishing news on the virus from the very beginning of the crisis, which coincided with the Shura Council elections in 2019. Moreover, he neither allowed the stricken cities to be quarantined nor provided them with medical supplies. Khamenei also forbid the import of the vaccine and is now killing infected citizens across the country.

COVID-19 STATISTICS VACCINATIONS The death toll from COVID19- has exceeded 100,000, according to official government sources, who admitted that the figure is not accurate. However, based on the daily statistics published by the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), the number of victims is approaching 400,000.

As a result of the Mullah’s rule, official sources and international media reported that 220,000 people are testing positive on daily basis.

The Wall Street Journal announced that every two minutes an Iranian dies, and this is the price of the Mullah’s rule.

“The coronavirus has gone beyond the pandemic stage and is now an endemic,” said Amir Masoud Hashemian, Associate Professor of Emergency Department at Mashhad University of Medical Sciences.

In addition to the fatal virus, the regime is killing Iranians by introducing ineffective and sometimes unauthorized

vaccines. According to a report by the Statistical Centre of Iran (SCI), the announced death rate due to complications from the virus among people who received the second shot earlier this month exceeded 2,072.

The number of deaths among the vaccinated is 10 times the international standard, the report noted.

The SCI pointed out that the death rate among the vaccinated Iranians is more than 75 times the corresponding indicator in some other countries. The rate is “unreasonable” stressed the head of Iran’s anti-coronavirus committee, noting that it requires a specialized analysis by the scientific committee.

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS SLAUGHTER? Khamenei refused to impose a quarantine since the early days of the outbreak. He also applied inhumane policies by forcing people to go to their workplaces, leading to the further spread of the virus. He has also prevented the entry of the globally approved vaccine into Iran. “Imports of US and British vaccines into the country are forbidden ... They’re completely untrustworthy. It’s not unlikely they would want to contaminate other nations,” said Khamenei. “Given our experience with France’s HIV-tainted blood supplies, French vaccines aren’t trustworthy either,” Khamenei added, referring to the country’s contaminated blood scandal of the 1980s and 1990s. Therefore, the country’s highest authority did not solve the health dilemma but rather exacerbated it.

Khamenei also concealed the number of fatalities and claimed that the sanctions and financial restrictions have prevented him from purchasing a reliable vaccine. It is noteworthy that providing a foreign vaccine would cost Iran under 200 million dollars. The US and the West have repeatedly stated that the sanctions do not include the purchase of vaccines.

“We returned international aid and sent back Doctors

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Iranian men who have been infected with the coronavirus disease lie on hospital beds in a COVID19- ward in Firoozabadi hospital in Shahr-e-Rey neighborhood in the south of Tehran on the day of Nowruz on March 2021 ,20. (Photo

by Morteza Nikoubazl/ NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Without Borders from the airport while we did not have much information about the virus, stressed the Head of Coronavirus Combat Taskforce of Tehran province, Alireza Zali, in his comments on the Mullah regime’s lies.

For this reason, Iranians are now certain that Khamenei is responsible for the hike in death rates and that he is the one who led and carried out this deadly plan.

Khamenei fears a revolution would overthrow his regime, so he took advantage of the pandemic to avoid it and followed the strategy of mass killing using the virus as a defensive shield. He somehow succeeded in preventing protests from continuing after 2019. Khamenei made sure people were preoccupied by maintaining their wellbeing.

The virus has killed hundreds of thousands and infected millions of people, and many Iranians are either in prison or have already contracted the virus. In this way, the Supreme leader restrained the people and prevented a revolution.

Of course, Khamenei, his fragile regime, and his Revolutionary Guards Corps are pursuing another criminal goal, which is to secure a source of funding. They have managed to create a black market to sell vaccines, drugs or even expensive medical equipment to people. It is killing people and taking money from their families.

Khamenei is currently facing a broad popular front and a widespread resistance. Every Iranian wishes to become a fighter in the resistance camps and wear the military uniforms in the PMOI’s revolutionary strongholds, which poses a threat to Khamenei. Therefore, the goals of the Iranian people and the resistance contradict those of the criminal Khamenei and there will certainly be an uprising.

Khamenei wants to relieve the families who lost members from the virus, but he is threatened by their rage, and fears they will break their silence and launch a revolution throughout Iranian provinces. His regime is certain it cannot contend with this broad front.

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Khamenei concealed the number of coronavirus victims in Iran and claimed that the US sanctions have prevented him from purchasing a reliable vaccine. But the US have repeatedly stated that the sanctions do not include the purchase of vaccines.

More importantly, these families are backed by the resistance, which represents them at the international level. Some of the resistance’s actions so far can be summarized as follows: - The resistance has succeeded in exposing the regime before the international community by revealing the true number of victims.

- Its supporters in Europe and the US have repeatedly revealed Khamenei’s coronavirus massacres.

The regime is currently facing multiple crises and has no way out. It has used the pandemic as a shield for more than a year now to suppress a people’s revolution. But its strategy is no longer effective, and people are so discontented that the virus can no longer stop their protests. This could now be the decisive factor that sparks a national uprising against the regime.

Mahdi Akabaei is a Member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).

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The Center Cannot Hold Will a Divided World Survive Common Threats?

By Thomas Wright Before the COVID-19 pandemic began, Washington was coalescing around a new bipartisan consensus: great-power competition, especially with China, ought to be the main organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy. For some, the pandemic called that notion into question by suggesting that transnational threats pose an even greater danger to the American public than ascendant rival powers. Skeptics of greatpower competition, such as Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, argued that the United States should seek to de-escalate tensions with China so that the two countries can work together to manage borderless risks such as pandemics and climate change.

But the debate over whether great-power competition or transnational threats pose the greater danger to the United States is a false one. Look back at strategic assessments from ten years ago on China and Russia, on the one hand, and those on pandemics and climate change, on the other, and it is clear that Washington is experiencing near-worst-case scenarios on both. Great-power rivalry has not yet sparked a hot war

but appears to be on the brink of sparking a cold one. Meanwhile, the worst pandemic in a century is not yet over, and the climate crisis is only accelerating.

What COVID-19 has made powerfully clear is that this is an age of transnational threats and great-power competition—one in which the two phenomena exacerbate each other. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Chinese government has been obsessed with maintaining its grip on power and has refused to cooperate with the international community to fight the virus. For its part, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump framed the international dimensions of its pandemic response almost exclusively in terms of competition with China, extinguishing any hope of a multilateral cooperation, even with other democracies. At the height of the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) became an arena for U.S.-Chinese rivalry, leaving the rest of the world to fend for itself.

Great-power rivalry and transnational threats will both shape U.S. foreign and national security policies in the years to come. Washington cannot downplay one in order to better deal with the other. Attempting to ease tensions with China to make cooperation on global public

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health possible won’t work, partly because Beijing cannot credibly commit to being more transparent and cooperative in the future. By the same token, ramping up competition with China without a plan to rally the world to deal with transnational threats (which can themselves fuel rivalry between great powers) would only guarantee future disasters.

The United States needs a strategy to address transnational threats under the conditions of great-power competition. It must aim to cooperate with rivals, especially China, to prepare for future pandemics and to tackle climate change. But in case cooperation fails, it must have a backup plan to rally allies and partners to provide a much greater share of global public goods, even if that means shouldering more of the costs. None of this will be easy, but all of it is necessary.

SECRECY AND SURVIVAL

(Clockwise from Top C) British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, US President Joe Biden, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Italy’s Prime minister Mario Draghi, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Council Charles Michel, Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s President Emmanuel Macron, sit around the table at the start of the G7 summit in Carbis Bay, Cornwall on June 11, 2021. (Photo by Leon Neal / POOL / AFP)

Competition between the United States and China has made the pandemic worse, and the pandemic, in turn, has deepened U.S.Chinese rivalry and inhibited international cooperation more generally. But the negative synergy between great-power rivalry and transnational threats was evident even before COVID-19. In the decade after the SARS epidemic of 2002–4, the United States and China had developed a working relationship on global public health. On the eve of the current pandemic, the United States had dozens of public health professionals stationed at the U.S. embassy in Beijing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration. Among them was a team of approximately 12 CDC officials working on infectious diseases and pandemic preparedness. (The Trump administration had redeployed a number of CDC officials working on AIDS funded through the President’s Emergency Plan for aids Relief to countries such as Uganda, but the embassy team working on pandemic preparedness remained in place.)

But as a number of U.S. embassy officials told the foreign policy analyst Colin Kahl and me for our book Aftershocks, this team’s cooperation with the Chinese government became more challenging as U.S.-Chinese rivalry intensified, largely because of China’s actions. In 2018 and 2019, for instance, Chinese officials refused to fully share samples of a strain of bird flu known as H7N9 with the WHO’s “collaborating centers” for influenza, frustrating their U.S. counterparts. At the time, public health experts believed that this form of influenza, or some variant of it, could potentially be the source of the next global pandemic.

Chinese public health officials also grew more reluctant to engage with their U.S. counterparts. In 2019, the U.S. embassy in Beijing hosted an event to mark 40 years of U.S.-Chinese relations. U.S. officials had planned to highlight public health cooperation— widely regarded as a success story in a sometimes tumultuous bilateral relationship—and several Chinese public health officials were slated to speak. But 24 hours before the event, amid rising trade tensions, all the Chinese officials canceled. It was a harbinger of things to come.

When COVID-19 hit, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)

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What COVID- 19 has made powerfully clear is that this is an age of transnational threats and great-power competition—one in which the two phenomena exacerbate each other. maintained near-absolute secrecy. All channels of communication between Beijing and Washington went silent, as they did between Beijing and other governments. Chinese leaders sought to conceal vital information about the emerging epidemic in China from the rest of the world, even attempting to prevent Chinese scientists from sharing the genetic sequence of the virus with scientists in other countries. (A Chinese scientist deliberately disobeyed the order and collaborated with an Australian counterpart.) Beijing also pushed the WHO not to declare the outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern,” an official designation that would have required a coordinated international response, and not to support or even remain neutral on placing travel restrictions on China.

The Chinese government’s actions put the WHO in a difficult position and constrained its choices. During the SARS epidemic, Gro Brundtland, the director general of the WHO, called out the Chinese government for covering up the outbreak and refusing to cooperate fully with the international community. The strategy helped persuade Beijing to shift course and eventually to engage with the WHO. The United States had hoped the WHO would use the same playbook with COVID-19 and publicly criticize—or at least refuse to praise—Beijing for withholding cooperation.

But senior WHO officials believed that Chinese President Xi Jinping was more dictatorial and less susceptible to outside pressure than his predecessors. If they tried to call him out, he was likely to shut them out completely. WHO officials also believed that working with China offered the only hope of stopping the virus.

If that required publicly flattering Beijing, then so be it—a calculation that put the WHO on a collision course with the United States.

It is impossible to say for certain why the Chinese government behaved the way it did, but secrecy and control make sense in light of what the vast majority of China experts believe to be Xi’s top priority: regime survival. Xi did not want to facilitate an international response to COVID-19 that could have attributed blame to China or isolated it through travel restrictions, either of which might have damaged the regime’s domestic legitimacy. Instead, Xi leveraged the pandemic to his advantage: China’s suppression of the virus became a matter of national pride, held up by Beijing

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in sharp contrast to the experience of the United States.

Once it had controlled the virus at home, China became more assertive in its foreign policy. It linked pandemic assistance and, later, access to its vaccine to public praise for China and to favorable policy choices, such as participation in the health component of its Belt and Road Initiative. It also retaliated against Australia for seeking an international investigation into the origins of COVID-19. As the world reeled from the pandemic, China imposed a draconian national security law on Hong Kong, provoked a deadly border spat with India, and engaged in combative “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy around the world—aggressively responding to criticism, including by peddling falsehoods and disinformation. For China’s leaders, the pandemic revealed the inexorable decline of the West, confirmed Beijing’s power and capabilities, and created more latitude for the CCP to do as it wished.

TURNING POINT

Geopolitics also shaped the U.S. response to COVID-19. Contrary to popular belief, some senior Trump administration officials grasped the national security threat posed by the virus faster than their European counterparts did. Top officials in the National Security Council began focusing on the pandemic in early January, just days after news of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, became public. They were primed to pay attention in large part because of their suspicions of the Chinese regime: Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, had covered the SARS epidemic as a journalist for The Wall Street Journal, and he viewed the news trickling in from Wuhan in early 2020 through the lens of Beijing’s previous cover-up. But even though Pottinger and other NSC officials were wise to the danger, they ultimately failed to persuade Trump to make the necessary preparations to deal with the pandemic when it inevitably reached the United States.

Throughout 2020, the Trump administration saw the international dimensions of COVID-19 almost entirely in terms of the U.S. rivalry with China. As the administration began to formulate its response, those who favored a more comprehensive public health

Chinese leaders sought to conceal vital information about the emerging epidemic in China from the rest of the world, even attempting to prevent Chinese scientists from sharing the genetic sequence of the virus with scientists in other countries.

approach both at home and abroad were excluded or marginalized at crucial moments. The result was that the Trump administration focused more on holding China responsible for the outbreak and reducing U.S. reliance on Beijing than on the minutiae of global public health policy or the hard work of rallying the world to tackle the pandemic.

COVID-19 also galvanized the Trump administration to intensify the contest with China. When it signed the Phase One trade agreement with China in January 2020, the Trump administration was split into two camps: one that wanted to contain China and one that wanted to focus narrowly on economic differences with China and not pursue a broader strategic competition. Trump spoke in the hawkish terms preferred by the containment faction, but he sided with the camp focused on economic issues in concluding the trade agreement. By mid-March, however, Trump had joined the containment faction, convinced that the crisis— and the lockdowns it necessitated—now threatened his personal political prospects.

Two Trump administration officials who favored continued engagement with China told me that before COVID-19, Trump was something of a check on the containment faction. Once he saw the virus as a threat to his reelection chances, however, he became willing to endorse the containment faction’s preferred policies to counter China’s assertiveness. According to another senior official associated with the containment faction, the pandemic and China’s response to it helped unify the administration behind a more comprehensive strategy to push back against Beijing. Between March 2020 and the end of the year, the senior official said, the United States put in place more containment measures than it had in the previous three years, including restrictions on Chinese technology firms, sanctions on Chinese officials, looser regulations on diplomatic contacts with Taiwan, and recognition of the repression in Xinjiang as a genocide. In this sense, the pandemic was a pivotal moment in the U.S.-Chinese rivalry.

Competition between the two countries overwhelmed everything else, including U.S. cooperation with allies on the pandemic,

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A handout photo made available by Xinhua News Agency shows Chinese President Xi Jinping delivering his speech during a celebration marking the 100th founding anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, in Beijing, China, 01 July 2021. (EPA/ XINHUA/JU PENG)

Rather than unite the world around a common purpose, climate change is likely to deepen competition between major powers, especially as the transition away from fossil fuels creates economic winners and losers.

Director-General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (L) speaks during a joint press conference with Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto after their talks in the ministry in Budapest, Hungary, 23 August 2021. (EPA/Balazs Mohai)

leaving a global leadership vacuum that no one could fill. The foreign ministers of the G-7 countries were unable to agree on even a communiqué in March 2020, and the G-7 leaders’ summit in June was canceled and never rescheduled during Trump’s presidency. The EU tried to step up by increasing funding for the WHO and for COVAX, the global initiative to share vaccines, but it never came close to organizing a global response. China’s assertive foreign policy, and its attempts to use pandemic assistance to advance its interests, aggravated European leaders and convinced them to harden their positions toward China throughout the course of 2020.

During this period, there was hardly any international cooperation on vaccine development or distribution, no coordination on travel restrictions or the distribution of medical supplies, and limited cooperation on achieving a cessation of hostilities in conflict zones. The economic disruption caused by COVID-19 devastated low-income countries, which received little in the way of international assistance. Especially hard hit were countries, such as Bangladesh, that had made significant development gains in the last two decades and were propelling themselves into the lower tier of middle-income economies. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation found that in just 25 weeks, the pandemic reversed 25 years of progress on vaccination coverage, a key public health indicator. And according to the UN, the pandemic could force a total of 490 million people into poverty—defined as the loss of access to clean water, adequate food, or shelter—pushing the global poverty rate to around seven percent by 2030, compared with the pre-pandemic target of three percent.

CLIMATE WEDGE Pandemics are not the only transnational threat that promises to intensify great-power rivalry and diminish the prospects for much-needed cooperation. Climate change could do the same.

The global economic downturn caused by the pandemic occasioned a brief and modest reduction of emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, but those emissions have

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already begun to increase again. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international body of experts that represents the scientific consensus on the climate, the world is on track to warm by around three degrees Celsius by the end of the century—a rate and magnitude of change that scientists warn could be cataclysmic. Absent drastic, cooperative action, the world will see more frequent droughts and wildfires; more intense hurricanes, storms, and flooding; more transmission of diseases from animals to humans; the inundation of many coastal areas and low-lying nations due to sea-level rise, leading to the displacement of hundreds of millions of people; and the devastation of ocean and terrestrial ecosystems.

Rather than unite the world around a common purpose, climate change is likely to deepen competition between major powers, especially as the transition away from fossil fuels creates economic winners and losers. Countries that aggressively decarbonize could place sanctions and other trade restrictions on countries that do not, leading to counter-responses and new trade wars. In a recent report for the European Council on Foreign Relations, Janka Oertel, Jennifer Tollmann, and Byford Tsang argue that the impediments to cooperation between Europe and China on climate change “are becoming higher” and warn that “decisionmakers must not underestimate the highly competitive aspects of how China is changing its energy production and consumption.”

The United States and Europe will both compete with China for access to raw materials and in developing the technology needed to make their economies carbon neutral: magnets, batteries, highperformance ceramics, and light-emitting diodes, among other things. In some of these areas, the United States and Europe are at risk of dependence on China, so they will want to make themselves more self-reliant as they develop clean technology.

Climate change could even drive a wedge through the transatlantic alliance if the United States elects another president who seeks to undermine efforts to reduce carbon emissions, as Trump did. And even if the U.S. government remains broadly aligned with Europe on climate policy, the Europeans could still become disaffected if Congress blocks meaningful climate action, such as commitments to cut carbon emissions or invest in clean technology. This, in turn, could diminish Europe’s willingness to help uphold the U.S.-led international order.

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THE LIMITS OF COOPERATION Some analysts, mainly on the right, care about the foreign aspects of transnational threats only to the extent that they can blame China for them, effectively wielding China’s malign influence on the WHO or its centrality to the problem of climate change as a cudgel in the geopolitical rivalry. They do not even try to provide an affirmative agenda for international cooperation on these threats—all but guaranteeing that they will exact a heavy human toll and heighten geopolitical tensions. The disease that causes the next pandemic could be just as contagious as COVID-19 but much more lethal and impervious to vaccines. Climate change is only getting worse.

Other analysts, mainly on the left, argue that the United States should set aside its contest with China or at least attempt to ease tensions in order to cooperate on shared challenges. It is unclear what exactly they intend. If, on the one hand, they mean softening U.S. rhetoric without conceding much of substance to China, they would do well to look to Europe, where governments were much more inclined than the Trump administration to cooperate with China, but China did not take them up on the offer. To the contrary, China became much more assertive and confrontational in its approach to Europe. If, on the other hand, they mean unilaterally making major geopolitical concessions to China—on its territorial acquisitions in the South China Sea, for instance, or the status of Taiwan—the United States would not only pay an extremely high price but also likely embolden Beijing further without actually securing cooperation on pandemics or climate change beyond what Beijing has already offered. Deliberately undercutting U.S. interests on matters unrelated to transnational threats is not a sound strategy.

There is no getting around strategic competition with Beijing: it is deeply embedded in the international order, mainly because China seeks to expand its sphere of influence in Asia at the expense of the United States and its allies, which are in turn committed to thwarting Beijing’s plans. The United States and China are also engaged in what Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national secu-

In case cooperation with China fails, the US must have a backup plan to rally allies and partners to provide a much greater share of global public goods, even if that means shouldering more of the costs.

rity adviser, recently called “a competition of models.” China is seeking to make the world safe for the CCP and to demonstrate the effectiveness of its system. This entails pushing back against what it sees as pressure from liberal democratic countries that could thwart its objectives. For its part, the United States worries about the negative externalities of Chinese authoritarianism, such as censorship of international criticism of Beijing or the export of its tools of repression to other countries. The United States also worries about what would happen to the military balance of power if China secured an enduring advantage in key technologies.

Even in diplomacy, friction will be endemic to the U.S.-Chinese relationship and will affect the broader international order for the foreseeable future. Outright confrontation can be avoided—but competition cannot.

This competition places real limits on cooperation. Take the arena of global public health: many studies on how to improve pandemic preparedness call on world leaders to dramatically strengthen the WHO, including by giving it the same power to enforce international health regulations as the International Atomic Energy Agency enjoys with nuclear nonproliferation rules. This recommendation is not new. Several reviews of the WHO’s performance during previous health emergencies, including the West African Ebola epidemic of 2014–16, have recommended sanctions in the event of noncompliance with international health regulations by member states, but the member states have not granted that power to the WHO. The problem is getting every government to agree to a universally applicable mechanism for sanctions or some other enforcement mechanism. China will not agree to any reform that would involve intrusive inspections of its scientific research facilities. And even if Beijing were to agree to vague language that could be interpreted as allowing these actions, the lesson of the COVID-19 pandemic is that it will not live up to its word when a crisis occurs.

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Delegations gather for the 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York. (Photo

by REUTERS / Lucas Jackson)

The Trump administration focused more on holding China responsible for the outbreak and reducing U.S. reliance on Beijing than on the minutiae of global public health policy or the hard work of rallying the world to tackle the pandemic.

WHEN COOPERATION FAILS

The need for cooperation on transnational threats must change how the United States competes with China—not whether it competes. U.S. officials should not give up on China entirely; instead, they should make a good-faith effort to work with Beijing, both bilaterally and in multilateral settings. Recognizing that there are strict limits on U.S.-Chinese cooperation is not the same as saying that no cooperation is possible. China has an interest in tackling pandemics and climate change, and diplomacy may help incrementally. But the real challenge is determining what to do when cooperation with China and other rivals falls short of what is required. The United States needs a backup plan to tackle shared challenges through coalitions of the willing.

When it comes to pandemic preparedness, this means fully supporting the WHO (including by pressing for needed reforms) but also forging a coalition of like-minded states: a global alliance for pandemic preparedness that would regularly convene at the headof-state level and work alongside nongovernmental organizations and the private sector. Any country that accepts the conditions of membership should be able to join. But those conditions should be strict and include a commitment to transparency beyond what is currently required by the international health regulations—for instance, granting WHO inspectors the kind of authority enjoyed by their counterparts at the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Crucially, whenever the WHO declared an international public health emergency, alliance members would coordinate on travel and trade restrictions, as well as on public messaging and financial penalties and sanctions. Those penalties and sanctions would be aimed at those states that failed to provide sufficient access to or fully cooperate with the WHO. The alliance would support, not supplant, the WHO. For any such coalition to succeed, the United States and its allies and partners would have to take on a far greater share of the burden of providing global public goods. The G-7, for ex-

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ample, could have committed to vaccinating the world against covid-19 at its June summit, instead of just promising to purchase and distribute 870 million vaccine doses, approximately ten percent of the global need. A coalition could also step up in a big way to help developing nations build the capacity to prepare for future pandemics and invest in therapeutics, diagnostics, and vaccines.

The situation is more complicated with respect to climate change.

The United States is a less reliable partner in this arena, and China’s survivalist instincts could in theory make it more willing to mitigate climate threats than to strengthen the WHO. Sustained, managed competition with China could potentially help the United States build bipartisan support for investments in clean technology that would prevent Beijing from gaining an enduring advantage in this area. But the United States and the European Union will also need to build coalitions of the willing to deal with the international security consequences of accelerated climate change, such as extreme weather events that threaten large numbers of people, and to address the foreign policy dimensions of climate action, including managing the risk that a shift away from fossil fuels could destabilize countries and regions that are dependent on oil exports.

Two separate constellations of powers are steadily emerging, one largely democratic and led by the United States and the other authoritarian and led by China. These constellations are interdependent but riven by distrust and rivalry. Cooperation across this divide should always be the first choice in times of shared crisis, but as the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, the U.S.-led constellation must always have a backup plan. It did not have one in 2020. It needs one for the next crisis THOMAS WRIGHT is Director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution and a coauthor, with Colin Kahl, Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order.

This article was originally published in the September/ October 2021 issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine and on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Saudi Government Agencies Grow More Business-Like

Customer-centric Experience Helps Overcome Bureaucratic Challenges

By Motasem Al Felou - Jeddah

procedures in the Kingdom.

“A few weeks ago, there was a miscommunication with the Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority (ZTCA) regarding my company’s tax return, which led to a problem with the authority. I called the point of contact at ZTCA to solve the problem. I was amazed with the prompt response.

The PoC called me several times until the problem was fixed,” said Khalid, 39, an accounting head at a Jeddahbased company, when speaking to Majalla about VAT

The Saudi business community has felt a big difference in dealing with the Saudi bureaucracy. The same is applied to ordinary citizens and expats, who do not have to spend long hours at government agencies to finalize their paperwork.

The Saudi government agencies are run more like a business.

Some of those agencies used to be challenged as inefficient, moribund and bloated. The public agency management has

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come a long way after launching the Kingdom Vision 2030 in April 2016.

YOUNGER GENERATIONS AND MORE TRANSPARENCY “A couple of young employees from the Saudi Customs came to check the records of our company›s imports. Our chief accountant was Indian, and they communicated with him in English. It was a random visit to check our accounts, and make sure the company is not involved in suspicious or illegal transactions. They made it clear to us from the very beginning,” said Abdullah, 46, a clerk in an import and export company.

Younger generations of Saudi managers are taking the lead in many government agencies. More and more young government agencies› leaders are headhunted from the private sector. The requirements of employment include speaking English, proven record of successful management and achievements.

A Saudi national wearing a face mask gets his passport from a Saudi Immigration officer, at the King Khalid International Airport, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 16, 2021. (File photo: Reuters)

«It is not about filling senior managerial positions with people, who have good university degrees. The government is looking for highly qualified people, who can run government agencies with a business mentality. Productivity, competitiveness, quality, and innovation are the new criteria. The old image of the government clerks, who just finish their office hours and leave home is about to disappear,» said Yaser, a retired ex-government clerk in his mid-sixties.

Each government agency is required to generate internal and external reports on daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual basis. Government employees are evaluated on a regular basis and performance is becoming the only criteria when it comes to promotions and raises.

DIGITALIZATION From issuing official documents to tax payments, and from stamping documents to applying for unemployment benefits, from registering a villa under your name to launching a lawsuit, all can be done with a click of a button. Government agencies› official websites and apps cover almost all aspect of life.

Investors, citizens and expats have now less physical contact with government employees to issue, renew or cancel official documents. Digitalization makes it easier for people to avoid bureaucracy and saves their time as well. With the help of technology, the whole country is well-connected, and decisionmakers have all the statistics, figure, numbers, and summaries needed to run the government agencies on solid basis.

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Saudi government’s dependence on the power of technology and digitalization has helped in improving the investment environment, laws and regulations, and quality of life, which put the Kingdom in better ranking across global indexes.

Lack of information is the biggest barrier that prevents governments from taking the right decisions. It is like walking in the dark. However, the more digitalized the country is, the more the decision makers can tackle the problems efficiently.

Technology is playing a key role in good governance.

Coupled with good intentions and a strong will of reform, comprehensive and detailed reports can help the country improve its performance on different levels.

Saudi government›s dependence on the power of technology and digitalization has helped in improving the investment environment, laws and regulations, and quality of life, which put the Kingdom in better ranking across global indexes. For example, the Kingdom›s rank in the World Index for Starting a Business rose from 60th rank in 2019 to 15th globally in 2020. Why? The secret is the ease of the process through digitalization. Commercial registers can be opened in just 180 seconds.

SOCIAL MEDIA Just like private companies, all government agencies have social media channels. They are active and interact with the audience as if they were real “customers”. People complain because of delays or technical problems; they also send their inquiries to explain specific processes. The community manager is always active and guides complainants to the right solutions. For example, the Immigration Department receives inquiries about delays in passport issuance or residence permit renewal or visa problems.

“I once had a problem with my passport delivery. I sent a complain on Twitter and they asked for more details.

My problem was solved in 48 hours. I felt like I was the Immigration Department’s favorite customer,” concluded Abdulrahman, a Saudi teacher, who believes that dealing with government agencies has never been easier.

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People Liked Malls In-person Shopping: Amazon’s Solution to the Problems They Created

By Amanda Mull Since 2005, Amazon has changed how virtually every American shops. That February, the company launched Prime, the first-of-its-kind, lightningfast subscription delivery service that now has an estimated 147 million members in the United States. Along the way, Amazon invented its own shopping holiday, assembled an army of couriers

schlepping your packages in the trunks of their cars, and turned toilet paper into the kind of thing that people have sent to their homes by the case.

Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has made enough money to launch himself into space. Now we appear to know what Amazon’s next great innovation might be: building department stores.

On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon is planning to test several U.S.-based

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According to ‹The Wall Street Journal,› sources say Amazon is planning to open department stores about the size of a Kohl›s or T.J. Maxx.

(Dreamstime/TNS)

locations of a new brick-and-mortar retail concept that will focus on stuff like clothes, housewares, and electronics—the kinds of things you might have bought in a department store at the mall before the online shopping apparatus that Amazon helped create drove a nail into that business’s coffin. The stores would be the latest in a series of in-personal retail experiments for the company, which operates bookstores and Amazon Go convenience stores, among others, in addition to its ownership of Whole Foods. The stores will reportedly be about 30,000 square feet, which puts them closer in scale to the average Best Buy than to the multi-floor shopping meccas that dominated American consumer life for a century; they will stock well-known brands, as well as Amazon’s own lines of electronics and other products.

(When asked to confirm the WSJ report, an Amazon spokesperson said only, “We don’t comment on rumors and speculation.”)

For anyone who’s even casually followed the flagging fortunes of America’s department stores over the past 15 years, this move might strike you as counterintuitive. Especially during a pandemic, when online shopping has grown explosively and millions of people have gotten used to ordering even their groceries on the internet, why would the world’s most powerful retailer snap up the expansive brick-and-mortar storefronts that have long been a financial albatross for many of its competitors? But the more parts of our lives move online, the clearer it becomes that some things are just better done in person, both logistically and spiritually.

Amazon’s continued creep into in-person shopping is just the most recent evidence that America is headed for a digital shakeout.

On a certain level, buying anything you need in life on the internet is undeniably convenient—at least up front. You have more options, you can do research on the fly, and thanks to Amazon Prime’s dominance, most big retailers have been forced to provide free shipping and free returns on basically everything. You can “run errands” while you watch Netflix or wait in line for the bathroom at a bar, and whatever you ordered will show up in two or three days. E-commerce giants have worked for years to break down people’s reluctance to buy items such as clothing and furniture—products that are highly sensitive to taste and preference in ways not always captured in photos—without seeing them in

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When online shopping has grown explosively, why would the world’s most powerful retailer snap up the expansive brick-andmortar storefronts that have long been a financial albatross for many of its competitors? person. Companies have been extremely successful at this; in 2020, Amazon passed Walmart and its huge network of big-box stores as America’s largest clothing retailer.

Unfortunately, no matter how much you streamline product search or payments processing, physical objects still exist in the world. Clothing and furniture still have to be moved from distribution centers to customers, and the labor and freight required to get it to you are expensive. In that way, one of the primary conveniences of Prime is also one of Amazon’s greatest challenges. Because every shipment is free and arrives in a day or two for almost everyone, you don’t have to wait until you need several things to justify making an order; paying for the membership encourages people to use it as frequently and capriciously as they’d like. During the pandemic, the volume of online shopping taxed the country’s shipping and logistics infrastructure past its breaking point. There is no clear way for the industry to keep up if demand continues to grow.

The industry’s biggest problem is what is called “last mile” delivery—the process of actually ferrying your new iPhone charger or earrings to your door from a centralized facility. Traditionally, the United States Postal Service handles the bulk of last-mile deliveries in the U.S.. The country is too large, and too many people live too far away from highways and urban centers to make it profitable for a private company to include them in their services. Amazon has tried to solve the last-mile issue in a number of ways, including contracting out deliveries to barebones shipping operations such as LaserShip and creating its own gig-worker deliv-

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ery fleet called Amazon Flex. So far, none of these efforts appears to be a long-term solution. An infinitely scalable, profitable fix might not exist. Online retailers are already doing everything they can to cut delivery costs—many gig-work delivery services provide low wages and minimal benefits and require their couriers to use their personal car and pay for their own gas. Delivery workers who have done contract jobs for Amazon report driving dangerously and urinating in bottles to keep up with the expected pace of deliveries. (Amazon insists that its workers are well treated.)

And then there are the returns. Companies might

What solves all of these problems—the high return rates, the cost-prohibitive last-mile freight, the logistics nightmares, the buyer frustration, and the monumental volume of consumer waste it all sends to landfills—on some level? Stores.

have succeeded in making customers comfortable buying just about anything online, but those purchases still end up being returned at a much higher rate than things bought in person. When the sale doesn’t stick, the costs of all the incentives that retailers piled atop one another to make the sale in the first place start to add up unfavorably. Between 25 and 30 percent of online purchases are returned in an average year, and by one estimate, every return costs a retailer an average of $10 to $20. In 2020, when the pandemic pushed many people to buy more types of things online than they ever had before, returns shot up 70 percent. Taking returns is so cost-inefficient that in some cases, the largestscale retailers will simply refund your money and tell you to keep the offending product. Your new clutter is worth less than what the freight would cost to get it out of your sight.

The people who do Amazon’s math aren’t dumb.

It’s a company that pursues efficiency at virtually any cost, and encouraging people to buy three sizes of the same pair of jeans and send two back just isn’t efficient. It is, in fact, enormously wasteful on almost every level, and not even a particularly great experience for buyers, who now have to manage a small-scale logistics business to ensure that stuff they don’t want is repackaged, shipped back out within a given company’s return window, and actually refunded. Now imagine doing this with a sectional sofa that, as it turns out, doesn’t match your

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Workers pick items before filling boxes to ship at an Amazon fulfillment center, Aug. 1, 2017, in Romeoville.

The company is changing its drug testing policy and would no longer disqualify people from working at Amazon if they tested positive for marijuana.

(Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune/TNS)

A photo of a woman shopping in person at a clothes store. (Photo

by Arturo Rey on Unsplash)

rug after all, and is kind of uncomfortable to sit on, but is nonetheless already in your living room.

What solves all of these problems—the high return rates, the cost-prohibitive last-mile freight, the logistics nightmares, the buyer frustration, and the monumental volume of consumer waste it all sends to landfills—on some level? Stores. Going to a store. In America especially, this notion was obvious for more than a century. Department stores were actually such a good idea, something that people like so much and that works so well, that the Gilded Age barons who invented them used their stores to create middle-class identity from near whole cloth and keep it going for generations.

Amazon helped kill most of those stores, but that has only created a vacuum into which more Amazon products and services are ready to be inserted.

If Silicon Valley has taught us anything in the past two decades, it’s that if you have a bottomless pit of money, you can remake an industry in your image. You can acquire customers so quickly that they might not realize they don’t totally love everything you’re doing, and you can embed yourself in their lives in ways that would be tangled and inconvenient to remove, largely by snuffing out competition. Which leaves the retail industry in a precarious position: Amazon, and maybe a handful of its largest competitors, will go about deciding how you get to buy the things you need, with very little meaningful pushback. They’ll set prices, they’ll set

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Amazon helped kill most of those stores, but that has only created a vacuum into which more Amazon products and services are ready to be inserted. labor conditions, and they’ll decide which things are too inefficient for you to buy online. Apparently, those things will go into a store.

Amazon and the companies like it invent the solutions to the problems they created, and you pay for them to be implemented. At least in some cases, physical stores may ultimately win out. You can try on your new pants, sit on your new couch, and leave with the thing you wanted immediately, which, it should be noted, is considerably faster than two-day delivery. Yes, you have to go to the store, but doing so will likely obviate the need for you to go to the post office—the dreaded post office—next week. Work smarter, not harder. It’s what Amazon would do.

This article was originally published on The Atlantic Online.

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Climate Change is Killing Young and Old Health Scientists Warn of Extreme Heat and Call for Action

By Latifa el Hassanyeh The world is burning. This is not just a saying, rather a fact we witness daily due to climate change. Heat now is threatening human health, and is causing more deaths than hurricanes, tornadoes or floods in most years, creating a new public

health dilemma. This issue made health scientist raise a serious awareness call.

Researchers say it’s important to understand that climate change is already affecting our lives today - unless climate resiliency or heat action plans are put in place, particularly in historically marginalized communities, multiple people will suffer and

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die from extreme heat.

A 2020 analysis found that the number of heatrelated deaths in the US each year has been underestimated, since records typically only look at medical terms such as heat stroke, and neglects other potentially heat-related causes of death, like heart attacks and other underlying conditions.

Astrid Caldas, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists has stated recently to CNN: “If nothing is done, and people continue to be vulnerable, the number of people affected would go up.” Caldas called for the need to “have an idea of what could happen if we don’t act. It’s about trying to prevent what can happen, if we don’t take any action.”

Katherine Milton, originally of Juneau, Alaska, who is experiencing homelessness, cools off under a homemade cooling-off station and mist system that a neighbor set up in their front yard for people, especially those without homes, during the scorching weather in Seattle, Washington, June 28. (Reuters)

Hospital admissions because of heat related illness have increased lately worldwide, as well as cardiovascular and respiratory disorders. Climate change as latest studies reveal is affecting human health through the accelerating increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme heat events.

The heatwaves and wildfires that swept across southern Europe and the USA this summer have been traumatic and deadly. 600 excess deaths were reported in the Pacific Northwest in the USA alone.

In addition to the above, some statistical approaches estimated that more than 1,300 deaths per year in the United States are due to extreme heat, compared with about 600 deaths per year in the “underlying and contributing causes”.

It is important to understand that climate change is already affecting our lives today. Unless climate resiliency or heat action plans are put in place, particularly in historically marginalized communities, multiple people will suffer and die from extreme heat. diseases, mental health issues, adverse pregnancy and birth outcomes, and increased healthcare costs as well.

The consequences of climate change, that have started to affect human health, made leading experts to call on for moves to control the situation.

Academics from Loughborough University stated that the hot future requires urgent planning and more investment in research to reduce the risks of heat-related disease and death.

EFFECT OF HEAT ON HEALTH

A two-part series on heat and health published in The Lancet warned that heat-related morbidity and mortality will likely increase if investment in eviAccording to the Sixth Assessment Report of dence-based research and risk-management strateWorking Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel gies are not stepped up. on Climate Change, global temperature is expect- The series brought together academic experts from ed to reach or exceed 1·5°C of warming, averaged epidemiology, physiology, medicine, climate sciover the next 20 years. (The Panel synthesizes the ence, built environment, and sustainable devellatest scientific evidence on climate change, )The opment with contributions from 15 authors from report predicts that these record-breaking tempera- eight countries spanning four continents. tures will be more frequent, intense, and last longer A two-part modelling study by Katrin Burkart and colleagues from the Global Burden of Diseases, because of human-induced climate change.

Increases in the overall temperature of the atmos- Injuries, and Risk Factors Study is the first comphere and oceans associated with climate change, prehensive analysis of the global cause-specific cause changes in wind, moisture, and heat circula- temperature-attributable burden of deaths. tion patterns. These changes con¬tribute to shifts Analyses of data from 65 million deaths and temin extreme weather events, including extreme heat perature estimates in nine countries, indicate that extreme heat and cold are associated with 17 causevents.

Effects from extreme heat are also associated with es of death—largely cardiorespiratory or metabolic increased hospitalizations and emergency room disease, but also suicide and several types of invisits, increased death tolls from cardiorespiratory jury.

The authors estimated that 1·7 million deaths

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worldwide in 2019 were linked to extreme heat and cold (356 000 were related to heat). Although these global estimates carry inherent uncertainties, the study shows the importance of temperature as a global health risk factor, and provides valuable data to assist policy makers and others in planning interventions.

CDC RINGS CAUTION BELLS Danger of heat extreme on health is well described

by Gregory Wellenius, Boston University professor of environmental health and director of BU’s

Increases in the overall temperature of the atmosphere and oceans associated with climate change, cause changes in wind, moisture, and heat circulation patterns. These changes con¬tribute to shifts in extreme weather events, including extreme heat events.

Program on Climate and Health, who stated: “Hot days can lead people to suffer from dehydration, heat exhaustion, and in extreme cases, heat stroke.

But hot days are also associated with higher risk of a number of other conditions that are not typically thought to be “heat-related,” such as kidney problems, skin infections, and preterm birth among pregnant women. Heat stroke, heat exhaustion, and dehydration account for a relatively small fraction of the total health risks associated with days of extreme heat. And interestingly, it’s not just extreme heat that poses a risk. Even moderately hot days can place vulnerable individuals at higher risk.”

Wellenius warned of health risks of extreme heat that are “real and important”. He recommended that individuals should stay out of the sun as much as possible, drink a lot of water, and find places to cool off when needed.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Washington assured that extreme heat events can be dangerous to health – even fatal. As papers issued by CDC clarified the consequences saying that extreme heat can trigger a variety of heat stress conditions, such as heat stroke, the most serious heat-related disorder, according to medical reports.

It occurs when the body becomes unable to control its temperature. Body temperature rises rapidly, the sweating mechanism fails, and the body cannot cool down. This condition can cause death or permanent disability if emergency treatment is not given.

Small children, the elderly, and certain other

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Portlanders seek refuge from the historic heatwave (June 2021 ,27 in Portland, Oregon) at the so-called “cooling refuge.” (Getty)

A Salvation Army EMS vehicle is setup as a cooling station as people lineup to get into a splash park while trying to beat the heat in Calgary, Alberta, Wednesday, June 2021 ,30. (AP)

groups including people with chronic diseases, low-income populations, and outdoor workers are of higher risk for heat-related illness.

Higher temperatures and respiratory problems are also linked. One reason is because higher temperatures contribute to the build-up of harmful air pollutions.

Many cities across the United States, including St. Louis, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Cincinnati, have seen large increases in death rates during heat waves.

HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF FROM EXTREME HEAT EVENTS? While many communities have programs to address climate-sensitive, CDC urged authorities to take actions to make communities less vulnerable to climate change impacts.

CDC also recommended approaches for staying safe, and managing the health threats associated with extreme heat: - Heat wave early warning systems can protect people by communicating heat wave risks and suggesting protective actions. These warning systems are much less costly than treating and coping with heat illnesses.

- Heat alerts serve as triggers for cities and counties to take preventive action, like opening cooling centers where the public can gather for relief from the heat.

- Air-conditioning is the number-one protective factor against extreme heat, which is an essential

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Air-conditioning is the numberone protective factor against extreme heat. Staying hydrated and avoiding strenuous outdoor exercise during heat alerts can protect individuals from adverse effects of extreme heat. health resource for vulnerable populations.

- Staying hydrated and avoiding strenuous outdoor exercise during heat alerts can protect individuals from adverse effects of extreme heat.

- Providing easy access to public drinking fountains, swimming pools, and spray pads can help keep people cool during periods of extreme heat.

- Updating building codes and landscaping laws can increase energy efficiency. It also improves the ability of buildings to provide protection against extreme heat events. For example, green roofs (roofs with plant cover) and strategically located shade trees can reduce indoor temperatures and improve buildings’ energy efficiency.

- Urban forests, including street trees and wooded areas, can mitigate urban heat islands, reducing local air temperatures by up to 9°F.

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Saba Mubarak: Ajloun’s Daughter is the Diamond of Arab Drama www.majalla.com

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Re-branding the Coastal City of Alexandria

“Tangible Heritage is but a Reflection of the Intangible”

By Amira Noshokaty The famous yellow and black taxi, the façade of the Cecil hotel, and Alexandria’s oldest florist shop are all literally in the palm of your hand.

“Miniatures of Alexandria” is the latest art project of architect/researcher and artist Mohamed Gohar. Born and raised in the cosmopolitan city, Gohar has always been fascinated

with the buildings of the city and all the intangible heritage they reflect.

With an eye for detail, Gohar’s artwork typically captures the essence of the city, for example, the tramway, the designs crowning the top of an old building, the twisting and turning of the iron in the front door of an old wooden elevator.

A few months ago, he started toying with the idea of pre-

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“Miniatures of Alexandria” is the latest art project of architect/ researcher and artist Mohamed Gohar. (Photo

by Amira Noshokaty)

senting the iconic landmarks of the city of Alexandria in the form of hand-painted postcards.

“The idea of the postcard is to form a new branding for the City,” explained artist/architect Mohamed Gohar, noting that Alexandria’s branding has not been updated for decades. However, Gohar built on the postcard idea and stretched it a bit further to create a personal engagement with his audience. The postcards he created are iconic images of Alexandria that are meant to be cut out, so that people can rearrange them and create one’s own cardboard city. He focuses on one street in his new series, Alexandria’s oldest street – Avenue Fuʾād.

When asked how far the tangible heritage of the city reflects its intangible heritage, Gohar explained that the tangible is but a reflection of the intangible.

“You see the way that the interior design of someone’s home reflects that person’s social background, the same goes for the way a building is built, what kind of architectural school it follows and its direct impact on the inhabitants,” he added.

Gohar’s passion to document his city goes back to 2013 when he founded “Description of Alexandria” — “a cultural and artistic documentation study seeking to document the heritage of the city and its architectural and cultural memories, presenting a true and actual image of today’s Alexandria and the recollections of the past. It also seeks to enhance the engagement of the society in preserving their legacy through a long-term awareness,” as he describes in the introduction to the “Description of Alexandria.”

“Here I am trying to document the city as I see it now, and trying to research the origin of the buildings and the reasons behind the change in such buildings,” explained Gohar elaborating on the status quo of the city.

“One should not narrow one’s scope to nostalgic architecture, on how a building used to look in 1920 in contrast to 2021 – for there are some popular districts that remained pretty much the same – however, one should start questioning the cause of such changes.”

(Photo courtesy of Mohamed Gohar)

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With an eye for detail, Gohar’s artwork typically captures the essence of the city: the tramway, the designs crowning the top of an old building, the twisting and turning of the iron in the front door of an old wooden elevator.

Gohar argues that an old building needs to have a function, for preserving uninhabited or unused old lavish houses kills the soul of the city. “Take Florence, for example, there are laws that prohibit any adjustments to heritage buildings, which lead a lot of people to live in modern buildings that address their needs leaving the old houses with no residents.”

Though an admirer of the details of old buildings, Gohar believes that every era has the right to have its own architecture that reflects the socio-economic and political status of the time it was built in and the epoch it witnessed.

However, unlike Florence, Egypt and especially Alexandria have lost a lot of its signature architectural gems throughout the decades. The problem is not only in the loss of the remarkable buildings that are relics of a bygone eras. It is also the fact that the new modern buildings that replace the old ones seldom put the needs of the community into perspective. Focusing only on the economic value of such new buildings, a lot of the cultural, environmental, health and social elements are totally washed off and the results are drastic.

“Take Loran neighborhood for example, since 2009, almost all the villas were demolished and replaced by 10 story buildings. So the place that was serving one family is serving 20. At what cost? At the cost of the other requirements of the building. So there will be rooms with neither proper ventilation nor a view and very little, if any, privacy at all. This by default creates lots of tension among the residents and hence impacts the health and social traditions of the residents in the long term. Consequently, the shady green street that was supposed to cater for 10 families, is now crammed with car fumes, fewer trees as well as catering for 100 families,” he noted.

“So the problem is not modern architecture, it is the devaluation of the essential elements of architecture in favor of the economic cost of such buildings, and how residents interact with such change impacts the intangible heritage of the city,” concluded Gohar.

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The Afghanistan War in Hollywood

Here Are 10 Movies that Featured the Two-Decade War

By Mohammad Ali Salih - Washington

rate or objective analysis of the Bush policies.

2. “Lions for Lambs” (2007): Directed by and starring RobA few days after the fall of Kabul into the hands of the ert Redford. The film was also critical of not only Bush, Taliban, Ann Hornaday, film critic in The Washington Post but, in an indirect way, the American people for marching wrote that “we have seen this movie before.” This often- heedlessly into a misguided war. used expression also has the metaphorical meaning that 3. “Charlie Wilson’s War” (2007): Actor Tom Hanks played the title character of a colorful Texas politician “history repeats itself.”

But Hornaday was quoting Lloyd Austin, US Secretary of who supported the Afghan mujahedeen who fought, and Defense, who actually said the expression to President Joe defeated, the Russian occupation of Afghanistan during the Biden to persuade him not to withdraw all American troops 1980’s. from Afghanistan. Austin had in mind the catastrophic and 4. “The Kite Runner” (2007): Based on a novel by Afembarrassing last days of the American troops’ withdrawal ghani-American Khaled Hossein. A story of two boys in Afghanistan with the historical background of the fall of from Vietnam in 1975.

Throughout the years, Hollywood produced tens of films the monarchy in Afghanistan, through the Russian invaabout the Vietnam War (1968-1975), some of them as re- sion and occupation of Afghanistan, and the mass exodus cently as last year, almost half-a-century later, and, as may of Afghanis to Pakistan and the US, including Hossein and be expected, the recent films tended to be more critical of his family.

5. “Taxi to the Dark Side” (2007): A documentary that the war.

In comparison, few films have been made about the 20- forcefully indicted the American program of the disastrous year war in Afghanistan, but most of them, starting with and criminal-like torture and detention of “terrorists,” as the first one, were critical – echoing the failed US military ordered by Bush.

6. “The Tillman Story” (2010): About former American intervention in Vietnam.

These are ten of about 20 Hollywood movies about the football player, Pat Tillman who was killed in 2004 by a friendly American soldier near the Afghanistan-Pakistan Afghanistan War: 1. “Fahrenheit 9/11” (2004): Directed by, written by, and border. His heroism was enhanced because the Pentagon at starring Michael Moore. The film was very critical of for- first tried, to hide what actually happened. mer President George W. Bush and of his invasions of both 7. “Restrepo” (2010): About the incompetence of US Afghanistan and Iraq. It was also critical of the way the forces in the face of hostile people, unknowable enemies, American media covered the wars, accusing the media of ineffectual bureaucrats and their own American general. A being “lapdogs and “cheerleaders” for not providing accu- memorable statement by an Afghani fighter to an American

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Poster of the movie: “Lions for Lambs” (2007)

Poster of the movie: “Taxi to the Dark Side” (2007)

Poster of the movie: “Charlie Wilson’s War” (2007)

Poster of the movie: “The Tillman Story” (2010)

soldier echoes current events – “You will be cowards if you leave. You will be enemies if you stay.”

8. “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012): The film came out a year after the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. It is about the decade-long search for him, his role in the 9/11 attacks, the details of the discovery of his hideout in Pakistan, and the details of the military mission that killed him.

9. “He Named Me Malala” (2015): About a young Pakistani girl who escaped Taliban’s tough laws against women in Swat Valley where Taliban had established a small “emirate.” She was the youngest person to win a Nobel Prize, and became a world-wide defender of women rights.

10. “The Outpost” (2019): A dramatization of the 2009 Battle of Kamdesh in Afghanistan between American soldiers and Taliban fighters. The film raised crucial

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Poster of the movie: “The Kite Runner” (2007)

Poster of the movie: “He Named Me Malala” (2015)

Few films have been made about the 20 -year war in Afghanistan, but most of them, starting with the first one, were critical – echoing the failed US military intervention in Vietnam. questions, not only about why those American soldiers were forced to fight a no-win battle, but also about the futility of the larger war in Afghanistan.

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The war between Layan and Maryam.

“Al Rawabi School for Girls” A Jordanian Series Full of Messages and Lessons

By Imane Ibrahim – Beirut

These voices reached the parliament and censorship organizations at that time.

All the pain of women in the Arab world, all the The “jinn” was not as creative as “Al Rawabi problems of female students at a sensitive age, School for Girls”. Its name does not seem attracand all the diseases of society, from a domineer- tive, but within this school, there is a summary ing patriarchal system to a scattered educational of the totality of what students may face, the imsystem, were developed by the Jordanian writer pression that abnormal family relations leave on and director, Tima Shomali, in cooperation with children and a comprehensive view of the huthe writer Shireen Kamal in the series “Al Raw- man psyche, where there is a seed of good in abi School for Girls” which was launched a few each of us. Some problems need only dialogue to avoid reaching the point of the explosion, and days ago on Netflix.

It is the second Jordanian production to be since the victim turns into an executioner, she shown on the international stage after “Jinn”, masters the use of all kinds of torture. which sparked controversy in Jordan and went The series begins on the bus where girls from as far as to provoke a demand that it should be wealthy families gather for the classy school for banned because of “insulting society and export- girls. Lian (Noor Taher), the strong girl with ing a misleading image of the Jordanian people”. wide popularity and the leading figure in whose

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Layan and her friends, Rania and Ruqayya.

orbit some girls are like escorts, and Maryam (Andrea Taya), the polite girl with a weak personality, in whom Lian finds easy victim, and begins to clash with her until she harms her.

In the beginning, the story seems unconvincing, and the launch of the first episode was weak concerning the escalation of events. There is no residual enmity between the two colleagues, except that the first found in the second a victim who is easy to pick on.

Maryam is abused as Layan accuses her of immoral matters, and her friends bear witness in her favor, and her mother believes them. Maryam decides to take off the robe of innocence and plot revenge.

Her friend Dina (Yara Mustafa), the simple girl, despite belonging to a very wealthy family, and Nouf (Rakeen Saad), the weird girl, who came to the school a year late after being expelled from her previous school, are under surveillance. Nouf (Rakeen Saad) helps Maryam to take revenge without appearing in the picture, and she pays the price of her academic year.

Amid the war between the two colleagues, unrealistic scenes appear. Layan finds Maryam’s diary, which she prints and distributes to the students in a very Hollywood-esque plot twist. The whole school is busy reading the memoirs of a girl who

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This series deserves to be watched by parents with their teenage children, to realize from their point of view, how the delay in dealing with matters may make things incurable. visits a psychiatrist because of her constant feeling of anxiety. The girls begin to bully Maryam and describe her as crazy in a scene that is not fitting for an international school where psychotherapy existence is as necessary as a sports teacher.

In addition to that, female students, in general, are bullies and do not have a sense of empathy.

The teachers have lost control over their students, undermining the image of the teacher who still enjoys a degree of respect in our schools.

The cliché is in the way the school is portrayed.

“Al Rawabi” does not resemble the schools that most of us attend, and it brings us back to the American production tropes that tackled the problem of bullying in schools with set visuals. Girls meet in the gymnasium, swimming, in

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the changing rooms, and around private lockers where ordinary disputes take place, and the heroine walks with her head bowed surrounded by her classmates drowning in laughter.

The series takes a different path in the last two episodes when we know about the remnants of family relations that made Layan a monster who enjoys torturing others and made her friend Rania (Joanna Arida) a copy of her, while Rokaya (Selsabila), the veiled girl, who walks in the orbit of her two colleagues, is broken at the first problem. Tough characters often hide weak ones hiding behind the veil of strength and might.

It is the second Jordanian production to be shown on the international stage after “Jinn”, which sparked controversy in Jordan and went as far as to provoke a demand that it should be banned because of “insulting society

Nouf is a strong girl whose body is filled with tattoos, and her face is filled with metal earrings.

She is eccentric, strong and impulsive, but at the moment when she is getting harassed, the mask of strength falls from her on a broken personality who is good at defending others as well as good at keeping silent about her right.

Teacher Abeer (Reem Saadeh)’s treatment of the issue of harassment opens the door to a type of woman who enjoys being a victim, finds excuses for the harasser and blames the abuser.

Returning to the victim who turns into an executioner, Maryam needed nothing but a family that understood her concerns, not a family that joined forces with her executioner to oppress her and strip her of all aspects of virtue, turning her into a bomb ready to explode and merciless even if the shrapnel of the bomb would harm innocent victims and the reaction was stronger than the act itself.

The series sheds light on the issue of honorbased crimes in Jordan which we constantly hear about. We read the names of victims, we sympathize with them and the criminal goes unpunished. But this time, we live with the victim and all the numbers that are recorded in the category of honor killing victims. Those victims turn from being numbers to being embodied on the screen in the form of humans of flesh and blood and feelings of love, hatred, disappointment and

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Maryam and her friends, Nouf and Reem.

Lian and her group

hope. The victim here pays the price of love in a society that criminalizes it, while she went out without punishment when she hated, and a colleague of hers paid dearly for her hatred.

How much pain does the series convey by revealing the bombs which exploded, when they could

Schoolgirls.

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have been defused with minimal damage? This series deserves to be watched by parents with their teenage children, to realize from their point of view, how the delay in dealing with matters may make things incurable.

The work counts several human, psychological and social messages that pass smoothly without direct preaching. In some of its scenes, it has not gone out of the circle of works we have seen before in the Spanish series “Elite” and the series “13 reasons why” when bullying leads the student Hannah Baker to commit suicide. This series pushed teens who suffer from bullying to imitate Hannah and end their miserable lives before the makers decided to go on a second season by way of flashback in which Hannah appeared in the image of the evil girl who paid more for her evil than how the bullying hurt her. In AlRawabi, the plotline is different as the series only encourages contemplation to learn lessons.

Al Rawabi is an entirely feminine series, in its writing, directing and stars, of 6 episodes, starring a group of young women, most of whom are introduced to the Arab audience for the first time, and they are Andrea Taya, Rakeen Saad, Nour Taher, Joanna Arida, Yara Mustafa, whose performance varies, but in general, they present an interesting work with the two talented actresses Reem Saadeh and Nadira Omran.

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Egypt’s Oldest Shoe Factory Still Surviving Unique Hand-made Shoes Manufactured for Above 60 Years

By Menna A. Farouk Amin Abdel Hameed, 70, stands inside his -69year-old shoe factory in downtown Cairo training people how to make a distinguished shoe.

Abdel Hameed is the owner of Babel Shoe Factory which dates back to 1952 and is famous for making some of the best and most elegant shoes in the country.

“There was a brand called Bally in Switzerland. The company was making high-quality shoes. So we decided to use the name from this brand but change it a little bit to have the name ‘Babel,’” Abdel Hameed told Majalla, “and we made similar high-quality shoes in our factory in Egypt.”

Abdel Hameed has trained hundreds of people about making a high-quality, distinct shoe. “I am a school.

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Many people come here to get training and then they leave,” he said.

The veteran shoe maker creates different, special models and receives many foreigners who want customized shoes.

ALL HAND-MADE “All our shoes are handmade and this is what makes us unique,” he added Abdel Hameed also said that in the old days shoemaking was mainly dependent on hand-making because there were no machines.

“At the time, a customer could wear a pair of shoes for about 10 years. Nothing would happen to it but even if something did, the person could come to our factory and we would repair it,” he added.

In manufacturing shoes, the Babel Shoe Factory uses molds which are accurate foot-like shapes made of wood in different sizes 42 ,40 and even size 50, depending on the width and length of the foot.

TECHNOLOGY CHANGES INDUSTRY

Photo shows the Babel shop in downtown Cairo. (Photo by Menna A. Farouk)

Abdel Hameed said that in the past people loved to buy customized, hand-made shoes.

“But now technology has changed everything. People are turning to ready-made shoes rather than patronizing the old shops which were making handmade shoes,” he said.

“Ready-made shoes are the fastest sellers and most widespread as they are present in all shops. Meanwhile, their prices are reasonable, unlike the prices of handicrafts which have become expensive due to the high price of raw leather.”

Khaled Abdel Hameed, brother of the Babel Shoe Factory owner, walking out of the factory in downtown Cairo

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“There was a brand called Bally in Switzerland. The company was making highquality shoes. So we decided to use the name from this brand but change it a little bit to have the name ‘Babel.’”

Abdel Hameed said that only the elderly come to the shop for customized or hand-made shoes.

Abdel Hameed’s brother Mahmoud said that he once had a customer who had a -10year-old shoe. “She came to the factory and wanted us to re-make the shoe. She loved it and wanted to keep it,” he said.

“I re-manufactured it and she was astonished. She said that this is not an Egyptian shoe, it is definitely a foreign brand,” the younger brother said.

CORONAVIRUS HITS INDUSTRY The Babel Shoe Factory has been largely affected by the coronavirus pandemic just like other businesses.

“We went for weeks not working or selling anything. It was a disaster. But things now are gradually recovering,” Abdel Hameed said.

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the economic slowdown, the unemployment rate rose to %9.6 by the end of FY2020/2019 from %7.9 in FY2019/2018 before declining again to %7.2 in December 2020 due to government efforts to contain the negative repercussions of the pandemic.

As the profession is going extinct, especially with the economic pressures, the brothers hope that they can open an institute to train people on shoemaking to keep the industry alive.

“This is a very unique industry that should not be dying. We have to protect it, continue to make handmade shoes and also export to other countries,” he said.

“This will not only create job opportunities for many young people, but will also boost the national economy by exporting hand-made distinguished shoes to other countries,” the shoemaker said.

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Saba Mubarak: Ajloun’s Daughter is the Diamond of Arab Drama

By Majalla Illustration by Jeannette Khouri Anticipation and an expected controversy await the screening of the movie “Amira”, starring Saba Mubarak and produced by scholar Moez Masoud, as the work was chosen for competition during the 5th edition of El Gouna Film Festival (Oct 14 to Oct 22).

Amira will also compete in the Orizzonti competition at the upcoming Venice International Film Festival running from September 1 until the 11th.

Saba Mubarak expressed her happiness with the selection of Amira to compete in the Orizzonti competition at the 78th Venice Film Festival and in its world premiere by publishing a picture of the film on her Instagram account. She commented: “I am very excited and happy about the world premiere of the movie Amira by my friend and director Mohamed Diab, and his participation in the Orizzonti competition at the 78th Venice Film Festival.”

Critics expect the work to provoke controversy because of its bold theme as the plot revolves around many issues related to Palestine through its heroine, Amira, a Palestinian teenager who was born through a microscopic insemination process after smuggling sperm from her father detained in an Israeli prison. She goes through difficult circumstances to find out the truth behind her identity.

Saba Mubarak is an actress of a special style, who enjoys playing difficult and diverse roles

and sets many artistic dreams in front of her as goals for every artistic performance.

She is a Jordanian actress, producer, and humanitarian with a rich career in cinema, television, and theater across the Arab world. She has played Arab and Egyptian roles, such as in the three-part TV series “Tayea,” “Afrah al-Qubba,” and “Hekayat Banat,” and has achieved a large fan base in the Arab world.

Saba has also participated in international cinema appearing in two episodes of the Swedish series “Hamilton” in the role of an officer from the Palestine Liberation Organization.

In her youth, Mubarak joined the Faculty of Fine Arts at Yarmouk University, then switched to studying theater and directing. Her start in acting came with the Jordanian social series “Qamar and Sahar” in which she revealed her talent to the Arab audience.

As a producer, her Jordanian production company Pan East Media launched in 2011 and produced the 2014 TV series “Asphalt Collar,” a Bedouin historical drama series based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It was broadcast during Ramadan 2014 on the Abu Dhabi channel.

In a short time, Saba will star in the feature debut of Jordanian director Zaid Abu Hamdan, “Daughters of Abdelrahman,” which is being produced by her company Pan East Media in association with Lagoonie Film Production. Sales and distribution for both films are being handled

by MAD Solutions.

The Jordanian star has wide experience as a jury member at international film festivals. She was

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selected to be a jury member twice at the International Emmy Awards, and also at the Feature and Short Competitions in the Malmo Arab Film Festival in Sweden, as well as at the 38th Cairo International Film Festival. In 2018, she joined as a jury member at the Short Film Competition in the 2nd El Gouna Film Festival.

Throughout her career, Mubarak has won many awards at the Arab and international level, including the Best Actress Award at the Silk Road International Film Festival for her role in “The Guest: Aleppo-Istanbul” that also won a staggering seven awards from international film festivals.

As for her personal life, she was married to director Chaouki Mejeri, who recently died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 58. After a short marriage which produced her only child, Ammar, they divorced in 2004 but continued to have a friendly relationship.

As a result of an accumulation of emotional issues since childhood and difficulties later in life, she recently suffered from severe depression.

She had to either evade the mental illness with medication or courageously deal with it directly.

In the end, she decided not to take medication, but to confront the disease with specific exercises, to understand herself more, to avoid the topics that lead to despair and sadness, and to embrace the support she received from her family and her son.

Saba recently graced the cover of Marie Claire Arabia wearing a selection from Gucci’s Pre-Fall 2021 collection.

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The First Saudi Woman to Enter Top 100 in World Squash List Nada Abul-Naga Benefitted from Saudi Squash Federation’s Efforts to Promote Young Players and Women

By Sarah Gamal Squash in Saudi Arabia is constantly supported

by Ziad Al-Turki, President of the Saudi Squash Federation, who has held the position of Chairman of the Professional Squash Association (PSA) since 2009. Al-Turki allocates an annual budget to support young players by involving them in several world championships, as part of the Federation›s plan to develop young players and advance their level by participating in major world championships.

The Saudi Squash Federation has also given women›s sports great attention after it agreed with the Saudi Riyadh Club to allocate one day a week to train female players wishing to practice squash, which is witnessing a remarkable turnout during the current period among girls. Accordingly, the players expressed their happiness with this interest and finding a place designated for them to practice their beloved hobby, after a period of time during which they decided to engage in training in private stadiums located in a number of hotels and private clubs in Saudi Arabia, for a fee.

The Saudi Squash Federation is considered one of the first federations to support women’s sports in Saudi Arabia, since the

Squash Federation hosted the first women’s international championship for female professional players, which witnessed the participation of the Egyptian Nour ElSherbiny, the world champion in squash, where the tournament was held in January of the year 2018 at Princess Nourah Bint Abdul Rahman University in Riyadh, with the participation of Saudi player Nada AbulNaga, in addition to a number of professional players in the world.

Saudi player Nada Abul-Naga became the first Saudi woman to emerge as a squash champion when she won the championship cup and the gold medal in the Kingdom’s Women’s Open Squash Championship, which was held on the courts of Riyadh Club and organized by the Saudi Squash Federation from 21-19 August.

Nada passed the competition with outstanding play that impressed many and topped the search sites on Google after the outstanding performance she played throughout the competition period.

Consequently, Saudi Squash Federation congratulated Nada on its official account on Twitter for winning the gold medal in the championship. The victory was further celebrated as she is registered as the first Saudi woman to master squash.

Nada Abul-Naga is a name that has sparked

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Saudi squash player Nada Abul-Naga.

(Photo: Social Media)

a lot of controversy inside and outside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia after she became the first player to participate in an international squash tournament, especially that the Gulf community in general and the Saudi community in particular did not approve of women practicing the sport, especially if its clothes have a special character and a distinctive outfit, which is the short skirt.

She is a girl known for her boldness in raising issues and talking about them through the social platform, Twitter. She is also a former project coordinator at Rotana.

She holds a master›s degree in marketing from Grenoble, France, and is fluent in 4 languages. In addition, she won third place in the Miss Fitness Golds Gym competition in 2012.

She started her sports journey by trying out 5 different sports in 2008 before settling for squash. She took part in basketball, volleyball, tennis, football, and weightlifting before finding her passion in squash. She officially became a professional squash player in 2010 and participated in major championships.

The lack of specialized training cadres in the sport of squash in the Kingdom did not

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She started her sports journey by trying out 5 different sports in 2008 before settling for squash. She took part in basketball, volleyball, tennis, football, and weightlifting before finding her passion in squash. prevent Nada Abul-Naga to achieve her success, rather she overcame this obstacle by traveling abroad to learn and become a squash pro, after which she succeeded in her achievements and training those wishing to practice it.

After her enthusiasm and determination, Prince Ziad Al-Turki, Chairman of the Professional Squash Association (PSA), sent her a special invitation to play in the first Open Women›s Squash Championship - organized by the Saudi Squash Federation in cooperation with King Saud University in Riyadh - in which the player won the championship title.

H

ealth

Grieving: A Natural Process to Help Heal Here’s How to Navigate the Mourning Process

By Matthew Solan The loss of someone can affect your mental and emotional health for months or even years.

Grief is an unfortunate reality of life. At some point, almost everyone experiences the passing of a loved one, whether it’s a relative, a friend, your spouse, or a beloved pet. The emotional and physical pain that follows can feel debilitating.

“Grieving is a natural process that most people simply have to work through,” says Dr. David H. Rosmarin, director of the Spirituality and Mental Health Program at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital. “Everyone grieves at their own pace and in their own way, and the process is essential to healing.”

TYPES OF GRIEF Grief can be characterized by feelings of sadness, hopelessness, depression, anger, numbness, and guilt.

Prolonged grief also can lead to other problems, like memory issues, pain and fatigue, and obsessive behavior, like becoming overly concerned with mundane matters.

There are many categories of grief (some experts place the number as high as 16). But Dr. Rosmarin says most people face one of three types: normal, disenfranchised, or complicated.

The differences between them are sometimes subtle.

They often manifest as how people initially react to

the loss, the severity of their grief, and its duration.

“Each of these three has its own level of difficulty,” says Dr. Rosmarin. “Normal is hard, disenfranchised is a bit harder, and complicated is the most difficult.”

Here’s a look at each one.

Normal. Also known as uncomplicated grief, it’s the most common type. Normal grief lasts about six months to two to three years.

Disenfranchised. This kind is not usually acknowledged or socially accepted. It may occur with the loss of a pet, a more distant friend, or even a stranger.

“People feel they don’t have permission to mourn or that it should be minimized,” says Dr. Rosmarin. “Putting this kind of restriction and timetable on grief can make the process last longer and be more severe.”

Complicated. In these cases, people have trouble accepting the loss. They shut themselves off from friends and family and experience bouts of depression, loneliness, and paralysis. This makes recovery difficult, and they usually need help from a therapist. Without therapy, complicated grief sometimes lasts several years.

DIFFERENT SOURCES THAT CAN CAUSE GRIEF Grief doesn’t have to be related to death. It can arise if someone you know suffers a permanent setback, such as from dementia, stroke, or cancer. The ending of a relationship, a move to a new place, or any other kind of personal separation also can cause grief.

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(Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash)

GOOD MOURNING The saying “time heals all wounds” is somewhat true when it comes to grief. For some, it can be a short and relatively painless process. For others, it’s a long and agonizing journey. Even when the grieving period has ended, the feelings may reappear during anniversaries, birthdays, or situations that trigger memories of the person.

There’s only so much we can do about grief management, says Dr. Rosmarin. “The best way to deal with grief is to look for ways to make the mourning and healing process less challenging.”

Here are some suggestions.

Accept your grief. Give yourself permission to grieve. “Don’t keep it inside and hope it goes away,” says Dr. Rosmarin. “Focusing only on external stressors instead of internal feelings, and keeping emotions suppressed, complicates the grieving process and makes it harder to work through.”

Cherish mementos. Keeping tokens of the person is a healthy and normal practice. “It’s a way to keep that relationship connection together and his or her memory alive while you grieve,” says Dr. Rosmarin.

Embrace the person’s community. Reach out to that individual’s social circle -- family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers -- even if you don’t know them well. “Learning more about the person from others and sharing stories helps everyone

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There’s only so much we can do about grief management, says Dr. Rosmarin. “The best way to deal with grief is to look for ways to make the mourning and healing process less challenging.” through the process,” says Dr. Rosmarin. “Plus, everyone can fill the role of listener, which is so helpful for grieving people.”

Talk with others who have grieved. You may know people who have experienced a similar loss.

Ask them how they mourned. “Listening to someone else’s perspective can offer insight into how to manage your own grief,” says Dr. Rosmarin.

Explore spirituality. Spirituality can be a powerful healing tool no matter what form it takes. “Thinking about the natural course of life and death can be quite transformative,” says Dr. Rosmarin. “It can even help you better accept the loss by embracing your own mortality.”

This was originally published by Harvard Men’s Health Watch.

B

ook Reviews

“All the Frequent Troubles Our Days” by Rececca Donner The Riveting Story of an American Who Led a Resistance Group Against Nazis

By Laura McCallum

where we wish we didn›t know the ending.

Harnack was guillotined on Feb. 16, 1943, at the age of 40 on Adolf Hitler›s direct Wisconsin native Mildred Harnack was the orders, which we learn on page 6. Yet only American to help lead a Nazi-resist- knowing her terrible fate from the onset ance group in Germany during World War shouldn›t dissuade you from reading this II — and you›ve probably never heard of page-turner about Harnack›s perilous journey, no matter how much you know about her.

Her largely unknown story is brought to the Holocaust and the brave resistance light in «All the Frequent Troubles of Our movement.

Days» by Rebecca Donner, also the author Born in Milwaukee, Mildred Fish was studof a novel, a graphic novel and many es- ying for a master›s degree at the University says. But this book is personal — Mildred of Wisconsin when she met German doctoral student Arvid Harnack. The two marHarnack was her great-great-aunt.

«Three generations separate us. She pre- ried and she followed him to his homeland, ferred anonymity, so I will whisper her where she taught American literary history at the University of Berlin. Mildred quickly name: Mildred Harnack,» she writes.

Donner relies on surviving family letters, became troubled by the rise of Nazism. declassified intelligence documents and in- Donner›s descriptive style takes us inside terviews with survivors to tell Harnack›s «All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days» story. Photos and snippets of letters and paby: Rebecca Donner; Little, Brown pers are sprinkled throughout this compel(576 pages, $32) ling book, which reads like a tragic novel

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Book Cover Memorial plaque for Arvid and Mildred Harnack at the Berlin building where they lived )Wikimedia commons (

Nazi Germany and makes the book hard to put down. «Swastikas are cropping up like daisies everywhere: on posters pasted to the walls of U-Bahn stations, on flags and banners and pamphlets,» she writes.

Mildred is most anxious about the politician gaining popularity, «a high-school dropout named Adolf Hitler who, Mildred predicts, will bring ‹a great increase of misery and oppression.› « She begins holding secret resistance meetings in her apartment, forming a group she and Arvid name The Circle. She recruits like-minded members who first distribute leaflets urging Germans to «resist, resist, resist,» and later put their lives at risk feeding intelligence about Hitler›s expansion plans to the U.S. and elsewhere.

We see Hitler›s rise to power and increasingly violent crackdown on his perceived

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enemies through the eyes of Mildred and Arvid. Donner›s book documents their sham trials on charges of treason. Its title stems from what a chaplain observed when he visited Mildred in prison, emaciated and struggling with tuberculosis, yet intensely focused on translating a volume of Goethe›s poems into English.

«In all the frequent troubles of our days / A God gave compensation — more his praise / In looking sky- and heavenward as duty / In sunshine and in virtue and in beauty.»

Mildred Harnack didn›t survive to see the end of the war or Hitler›s downfall. But her heroic actions may now get the attention they deserve through this heartbreaking work written by her descendant.

This article was originally published on Star Tribune.